You didn’t need to watch “The Last Dance” to know that NBA championship teams are often rife with internal drama. For the Denver Nuggets, the struggle between general manager Calvin Booth and head coach Mike Malone played out in the public forum from the moment the champagne wore off on the team’s 2023 championship.
It was always going to be impossible for the Nuggets to keep their roster together after the title with a frugal owner and the new financial restraints from the CBA threatening every team. Bruce Brown and Jeff Green were the first rotation pieces to go, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope’s departure followed a year later. Booth and Malone had different ways of solving this problem: Booth wanted to play the young guys he drafted, while Malone had more trust in the discount veterans the team signed in free agency.
The tension between the two reportedly suffocated everyone in the organization. In the end, they both lost. The Nuggets fired Malone and Booth on the same day with just three games left in the 2025 regular season. It was a shocking move in the moment, but it’s become clear that it was a decision that gave Denver new life.
The Nuggets are now off to another Game 7 after beating the Oklahoma City Thunder, 119-107, in Game 6 of their second round series in the 2025 NBA Playoffs on Thursday night. Nikola Jokic was brilliant again with 29 points, 14 rebounds, and eight assists, but Denver doesn’t get this win without the young players Booth drafted stepping up.
Game 6 will always be known as The Julian Strawther Game. Strawther took over late in the third quarter with eight points in 90 seconds as Denver went from tied to up eight to start the fourth quarter. Strawther had only played 34 combined minutes in the first five games of the series, and hadn’t been a consistent part of Denver’s rotation since February. He gave the Nuggets the shooting and spacing they needed, and it legitimately saved the season.
Strawther has felt like the skeleton key to Denver’s “two timelines” approach since they selected him out of Gonzaga with the No. 29 overall pick in 2023. The Nuggets needed more shooting around Nikola Jokic, and that was one skill Strawther had. He hit 40.8 percent from three as a junior at Gonzaga, including one of the most memorable March Madness shots of the decade with his logo three to beat UCLA in the Sweet 16.
For whatever reason, it never really clicked under Malone. Strawther’s shot just hasn’t been very good as a career 33.2 percent NBA three-point shooter. He struggled defensively like most young offensively-slanted prospects entering the league, and he didn’t impact the game much as a rebounder or playmaker.
With Strawther floundering, the Nuggets finished dead-last in three-point rate (percentage of field goal attempts from three) this season. The Nuggets make them when they take him (37.6 percent on the year, good for No. 5 in the league), but the volume is important, and Strawther was one of their few players capable of getting them up in a meaningful way.
Strawther added four more free throws and one more three-pointer in the fourth to help seal the victory. Somewhere, Booth was smiling. The small samples of the playoffs can change everything, at least from a narrative perspective.
The Nuggets have showed their championship DNA in this series even as some of the depth pieces have changed. The Thunder won 68 games during the regular season and posted by far the best defense in the league — even with their second best player Chet Holmgren only playing 32 games because of a broken pelvis injury. Denver exhausted itself just to get here after surviving a tough seven-game series from the Los Angeles Clippers in the first-round. OKC figured to have a big advantage coming into this matchup, but the Nuggets have evened the series by stepping up on defense and executing their crunch-time offense perfectly.
The Nuggets have the best lead engine in the NBA in Jokic. In this era of the league, though, depth and fit around a superstar feel more important than ever. In Game 6, Christian Braun and Strawther each had fantastic games to take some pressure off Jokic’s shoulders. For the seventh (!) time in the Jokic-Jamal Murray era, the Nuggets are going to a Game 7, and they have the heavy championship favorite firmly on the ropes.
Denver has needed a punch of Strawther’s offensive game all season. He finally delivered in the biggest spot of his NBA career.
